that of the
Knights and their concept of labor solidarity narrower still. However,
these trade unionists demonstrated that they could win strikes. It was
to this practical trade unionism, then, that the American labor movement
turned, about 1890, when the idealism of the Knights of Labor had
failed. From groping for a cooperative economic order or
self-employment, labor turned with the American Federation of Labor to
developing bargaining power for use against employers. This trade
unionism stood for a strengthened group consciousness. While it
continued to avow sympathy with the "anti-monopoly" aspirations of the
"producers," who fought for the opportunity of self-employment, it also
declared that the interests of democracy will be best served if the wage
earners organized by themselves.

This opportunist unionism, now at last triumphant over the idealistic
unionism induced by America's spiritual tradition, soon was obliged to
fight against a revolutionary unionism which, like itself, was an
offshoot of the socialism of the seventies. At first, the American
Federation of Labor was far from hostile to socialism as a philosophy.
Its attitude was rather one of mild contempt for what it considered to
be wholly impracticable under American conditions, however necessary or
efficacious under other conditions. When, about 1890, the socialists
declared their policy of "boring from within," that is, of capturing the
Federation for socialism by means of propaganda in Federation ranks,
this attitude remained practically unchanged. Only when, dissatisfied
with the results of boring from within, the socialists, now led by a
more determined leadership, attempted in 1895 to set up a rival to the
Federation in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, was there a sharp
line drawn between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation. The
issue once having become a fighting issue, the leaders of the Federation
experienced the need of a positive and well rounded-out social
philosophy capable of meeting socialism all along the front instead of
the former self-imposed super-pragmatism.

By this time, the Federation had become sufficiently removed in point of
time from its foreign origin to turn to the social ideal derived from
pioneer America as the philosophy which it hoped would successfully
combat an aggressive and arrogant socialism. Thus it came about that the
front against socialism was built out from the immediate and practical
in